biola olatunde | the elders called today

The elders called today

to remind me
of the final burial
rites
of my beloved husband.


It has been forty days
of shaven head
in black robes
a boat ride
me and his stiff body
on the wilds of
the sea for seven terror filled
nights.


Now in obedience
to our tradition
I must choose
from the offered chewing sticks of
his brothers
my next husband
and master.


Am preparing the
meal we all must
eat
before this is
concluded
our traditional soup,
spiced with
arsenic and rat poison.

I am

an enter-educate writer, fiction writer and poet. I have been writing for some 30 years now.  I wrote a series of teenage drama stories that was sponsored by the United Nations Population Fund UNFPA which sponsored the series for television stations in my country Nigeria for more than two years. The series dealt with adolescent reproductive health issues. It was good enough for the Canadian International Agency to collaborate with UNFPA to have it adapted into radio series and also translated into pidgin as well as Hausa languages. I have also published on my own 5 literay works:

Stars in my eyes – which was about 3 women in an imaginary university campus in Nigeria | I almost did– poetry | Chants in my dreams – poetry | Tomorrow’s promise – poetry | The dream & Reality – An autobiography of my journey into writing | Meadows of my mind– a book of poetry I want to publish now. I like working with teenagers because my teenage years were not much to get excited about. For a while I managed an NGO. I am always writing for magazines, radio stations and sometimes for free.

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